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Hello all, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Georgina Tzanetos, Editorial Director with Institutional Investor. Welcome to our fireside chat series, Not the Time to Be Idle, Taking Action in Today's Credit Markets, with RBC. We have a panel of experts for you speaking on some of the most pertinent topics in today's credit markets, centered around impact investing, the deployment of cash as an opportunity to make an impact, and finally, different means of overall strategic liquidity management.
I have with me today Ron Homer, Chief Strategist of US Impact Investing at RBC and one of the pioneers of impact investing. Ron, why don't we start with you telling us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in impact investing.
Sure. I was born and raised in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and went to college during the civil rights movement. When I graduated, I had a strong desire and wanted to find a way on how I could use the educational opportunities I had to serve communities like the Bedford-Stuyvesant area, which is a predominantly black area, and had been in the state of decline over a number of years.
So I went on to business school and after leaving business school, the one place I found that had an interest in building communities in general was the banking industry. At the time, banks were restricted to certain geographies, and so I went into banking, had an interview with the president of the bank, told him what I wanted to do, and he said, “Gee, we don't really have too many people who have an interest in lower income areas and building those areas, but, if you are willing to learn the banking industry and try to apply your skills to doing that, I'm willing to support you.” So during the course of my banking career at this fairly large institution, I sought out ways in which I could use the knowledge that I had received about lending and some of the tools to apply them to the most underserved areas in the community.
After a while, I actually decided to leave the bank and help start a bank whose principal focus was investing in Harlem and Bed-Stuy, then moved on to Boston to do the same thing.
And along the course of that time, Fannie Mae, was getting a lot of pressure to increase its lending in particularly black communities. The whole banking industry was getting pressure to better serve low and moderate income communities, and I decided to take the skills that I had learned over the course of my banking career and create a fund whose principal goal was to provide access to housing, education, healthcare, clean energy, environmental affairs, particularly in underserved communities. And these were the factors that led to the creation of the Access Capital Community Investment Strategy.
All right, Ron, thank you very much. And thank you all for tuning in. Please make sure to stay tuned for our next conversation with Ron Homer of RBC, where we discuss the evolution of impact investing. Thanks for watching.